“Dispatch from a Pandemic: Charleston, West Virginia” by Ace Boggess

CNN stays on all day
as if I dropped the remote,
shattered it, & am too depressed
to walk across the room to the TV.

Easy to obsess over numbers
like working a giant Sudoku
in my head. In my head,
I see every cough, each corpse, &
all the rotting hallways
of improvised morgues.

There was another spike
today, another sad story.
People died. A lot of people died,
alone on the rack, crushed &
punctured in the iron maiden.
Did I know them? No.
Their deaths were news
if not noteworthy,
more skips of a stone
across the surface of a river
on its way to here.

I can’t stop rubbernecking,
staring down catastrophes.

Last night in Arkansas,
a tornado touched down,
filmed from all angles,
beautiful & cruel, a normal
disaster. I don’t have time for this.